The big data zoo: Taming the beasts

Big data is probably the single most important trend in information usage for both business and IT in the past decade. It is changing the way companies make decisions, do business, succeed or fail. Using information and insights intelligently to anticipate and profit from change, it is causing IT to look beyond traditional technologies, to new tools to process larger data volumes of a variety of types faster than ever before required.

Much of the focus on the big data zoo has missed one key point: big or small, it’s still data. It must be managed and integrated across the entire enterprise to extract its full value, to ensure its consistent use. Taming big data is the key to gaining that value. This paper offers three key things to take away:

1. The foundation for extracting the maximum business value from big data at its source is a technically diverse and deeply integrated plat-form for all information, both big data and traditional transactions

2. An enterprise-level approach—platform, products and processes—is mandatory to ensure long-term quality and use of big data in concert with existing data from business intelligence and other systems

3. Rapid deployment of big data projects is needed to take earliest ad-vantage of emerging business opportunities and is achieved by introducing big data capabilities incrementally into the current data management framework based around data warehousing